Backing up Ubuntu

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 1 Jul 2019 21:03:05 +0000, Mike Marchywka wrote:
>cp -rpuv

Here we go, even a simple command such as cp already isn't that easy to
use. From the manual page:

  -a, --archive
              same as -dR --preserve=all

  --preserve[=ATTR_LIST]
              preserve the specified attributes (default:
              mode,ownership,timestamps), if possible additional
              attributes: context, links, xattr, all

I'm in favour of using 'sudo cp -ai', the 'i' option isn't necessarily
needed, but doesn't harm. The 'v' option IMO is quite useless, but it
doesn't harm to log the output of the exit status by
'; echo $? > log.txt'.

I'm puzzled regarding '2>& 1 | tee -a "$lf"'

However, you are just making a backup of a user's data, this is
relatively safe, even on a running system, but it's neither completely
safe, nor a backup of the whole install.

While I'm in favour of using cp or tar, I strongly disagree that those
are fast, let alone that I'm using USB3, too and it's definitively not
fast.

I need around 4 hours to regularly backup just the most important
things from internal SSDs, to an external USB3 HDD. User's might need
to backup different amounts of data ;) and there are several
bottlenecks, USB3 for sure is one of those bottlenecks.